# StanceEval 2026: The Second Stance Detection Shared Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03215 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03215/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Stance Detection: A Dataset and Model using Generalized Topic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03640/) (2020)
- [Will-They-Won't-They: A Very Large Dataset for Stance Detection on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00388/) (2020)
- [Cross-Target Stance Classification with Self-Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06593/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Learning for Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06603/) (2021)
- [Prompting and Fine-Tuning Open-Sourced Large Language Models for Stance Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13734/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Meet Stance Detection: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08464/) (2025)
- [Cross-Target Stance Detection: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13594/) (2024)
- [StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12068/) (2026)
- [Mawqif-XT: An Arabic Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Target Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09539/) (2026)
- [MLSD: A Novel Few-Shot Learning Approach to Enhance Cross-Target and Cross-Domain Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03725/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Stance Detection in the Wild: Dynamic Target Generation and Multi-Target Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19802/) (2026)
- [TTLab at StanceEval-2026: A Cloze-Style Prompting Approach for Arabic-Language Stance Detection (CLASP-Ar)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29733/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

StanceEval 2026 is the second edition of the StanceEval shared task series on stance detection in Arabic social media text. Stance detection aims to identify a writer's stance toward a given topic. Given a tweet and a target, participating systems must determine whether the writer's stance is Favor, Against, or None. This edition focuses on cross-target generalization across two distinct evaluation tracks: Track 1 evaluates thematically related cross-target transfer (testing on Women Driving, related to Women Empowerment from training data), while Track 2 evaluates cross-domain transfer to completely unseen targets (E-Cars and Trimester System). The shared task attracted 80 registered teams from 12 countries. During the evaluation phase, 30 unique teams submitted entries, with 21 teams officially ranked in Track 1 and 13 in Track 2 following validation filtering, and 20 teams submitting system-description papers. Participating teams employed diverse methodologies, including fine-tuned pretrained language models, prompt-based and retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs), fine-tuned LLMs, and hybrid cascades. Top systems achieved impressive Favg2 scores of 0.8994 on Track 1 and 0.9400 on Track 2, substantially outperforming the strongest baselines (0.7366 and 0.7475, respectively), where Favg2 denotes the macro-averaged F1 score over the Favor and Against classes. Counterintuitively, performance on the unseen targets was higher than on the related target, a disparity could be driven by extreme target polarization, class imbalance, and dialectal or sarcastic nuance across topics.